Friday, October 10, 2003

Yet another reason to monitor outgoing connections on your machine

In June, the Pennsylvania teenager paid $91,200 to buy more than 9,000 put options on Cisco stock, which gave him the right to sell the shares at or below $15 per share before July 19, 2003, according to a statement released by the U.S Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts, which is also pursuing Dinh.
In the weeks following his purchase, however, Cisco stock hovered around $19 per share, making Dinh's put options worthless, Stark said.
Instead, Dinh allegedly set up an elaborate scheme to unload the shares in a bogus transaction. First, the teenager allegedly lured participants in an online stock discussion group to download a key logging program that he claimed was stock-charting tool, the SEC said.
After using the program to monitor the information typed on victims' machines, Dinh allegedly obtained the login and password information for a TD Waterhouse Investor Services Inc. online brokerage account owned by a Westborough, Massachusetts man.
With the victim's account information in hand, Dinh used his own online brokerage account to create orders to sell the worthless options, then hacked into the victim's online account and created corresponding buy orders for the options, the SEC said.
The transactions depleted around $46,986 from the victim's brokerage account, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.